Software QA FYI - SQAFYI

Automated Unit Testing Boosts Software Quality and Productivity

By: Sarah Conway

Adoption of automated unit testing requires management commitment and enforcement to ensure compliance across IT teams

the availability of "Coding In Quality for Business Agility," a new IDC white paper sponsored by Agitar Software examining how automated, iterative unit testing can help software development teams improve the quality of their applications and reduce development costs. With software defects costing the U.S. economy roughly $60 billion each year, the paper cites a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology that suggests $22 billion of these costs could be recovered through better software testing.

"IT organizations continue to feel relentless pressure to deliver more results with fewer resources as they cope with the increasing complexity and business criticality of software systems and applications," said Melinda-Carol Ballou, program director for Application Life-Cycle Management Software at IDC and author of the white paper. "Automated unit testing, especially incorporated into test suites, can help software development teams boost the overall quality of the software they deliver, cut costs, reduce the risk of failure due to defects, and free up resources that can be more productively applied to new development to generate new business value."

According to IDC, typical "top-down" software development encourages little testing before code is sent to Quality Assurance (QA) teams. The white paper estimates that software defects found late in the development cycle can cost 10 to 100 times more to fix when compared with the cost of fixing bugs during initial code creation. Errors that accumulate due to late bug detection force developers to revisit the entire code logic, delaying production and preventing development teams from smoothly adjusting code to suit changing business demands.

Unit testing allows development teams to inspect units of code during each phase of development thereby delivering more cost-effective, flexible and high-quality software. Citing exhaustive manual unit test code generation as the main barrier to unit test adoption, the white paper advises developers to adopt comprehensive automated unit testing solutions such as Agitar Software's AgitarOne to significantly reduce the risk of regression errors.

The white paper stresses the need for an up-to-date test suite to continually verify an application's quality as changes are made to legacy and newer code. IDC highlights how automation in unit testing gives developers immediate feedback on the code they check, allowing for immediate repairs to accelerate development and capturing business metrics to indicate the level of progress in a software development cycle.

AgitarOne is cited as a tool that can help development teams overcome the barriers to unit testing. The white paper highlights various features of AgitarOne, including "change detection" features through automated JUnit generation, "software agitation," which provides interactive exploratory testing, automated code rule enforcement, project dashboards to evaluate development progress against business targets, continuous integration support with cruise-control, and server-based deployment to further speed large enterprise deployments.

"For an enterprise that depends on how well it can deliver and enhance its software applications, fragile code is dangerous. The agile enterprise needs applications that are easy to change," said Jerry Rudisin, CEO of Agitar Software. "Having and using a thorough set of unit tests is the key to delivering good code sooner and to changing the code later with confidence. That's why unit testing should be a top priority for any development organization that is serious about time-to-market, productivity, and quality. Agitar's solution provides the automation needed to make unit testing far more thorough and effective than is practical with a purely manual approach."

Full article...


Other Resource

... to read more articles, visit http://sqa.fyicenter.com/art/

Automated Unit Testing Boosts Software Quality and Productivity